Good Enough Isn’t Good Enough
If I were merely interested in selling copies of the second Dakota & Svetlana adventure, The Rich Are Different, I would probably release the novel…
If I were merely interested in selling copies of the second Dakota & Svetlana adventure, The Rich Are Different, I would probably release the novel…
Because of a recent pharmaceutical spam attack on some of my websites, I am in the midst of moving this blog and DakotaStevens.com to another…
Every morning while living in Key West and Cuba, Ernest Hemingway rose early to write, and every afternoon he went out cruising and fishing on…
While in the post office the other day, a couple of postal workers who bought A Real Piece of Work complimented me on the writing….
Greetings, readers. Today, for the first time in the history of my blog, I’m making somebody else the focus. Today I’m going back to my…
Back in late November 2011 when I released A Real Piece of Work, I promised to release book #2 in the series, The Rich Are…
Last week I said I would report on the results of my 2 “free days” on Amazon’s KDP Select: the total number of free downloads,…
The big problem facing writers today is finding a balance between writing and self-promotion. I’m currently doing a free promotion of my Kindle mystery novel,…
According to the new, social-networking philosophy of book promotion, one of the most effective ways of building your audience is to give away copies of…
ONCE UPON A TIME there was a mystery novel, a mystery novel that only one agent and zero editors believed in. This mystery novel was…
I have read hundreds of books on writing. Conservatively figuring an average of 15 per year, over 24 years that makes 360 books on the…
This one is for you readers. For those of you who took a risk on a relatively unknown quantity (me) by plunking down cash for…
“I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass THE OTHER DAY, I wrote that I was going to “take it…
Friends, Romans, Countrymen: I’ve received dozens of messages from would-be book-buyers who say, “I’d love to read A Real Piece of Work, but I don’t…
A common piece of advice given to writers is to envision your ideal reader and write your book to that person. And although I didn’t…
What did I learn from publishing the first novel in my new detective series on Kindle? A lot of disjointed things that would take too…
The short answer is this: A writer writes to be read, and the two P.I. novels I wrote that were sitting on my hard drive…
Farewell, my beloved feline Muse. Writer Chris Orcutt’s eulogy to his faithful, beautiful cat of 9 years, Sweetie.
I had big plans for this blog entry. BIG plans. When I originally envisaged this piece, it was going to be a 5,000-word polemic on…
Walking into the diner yesterday, I glanced at the honor box containing our village newspaper, The Millbrook Round Table, and was shocked to read the…
A while back, I got in an online argument with another writer. He was proffering financial advice to writers, in effect saying this: “I made…
I’d like to share some thoughts about index cards. My new writing, with the exception of blog entries of course, is happening on index cards. The…
Quite a while ago, my good friend Jason started a Twitter feed about his cat, Sockington. The feed has not only become extremely popular, with over…
Today I opened my email and found a lovely note from a fellow writer, La Belette Rouge. She wrote to tell me that a blog…
“All I know is that at a very early stage of the novel’s development I get this urge to garner bits of straw and…
He didn’t go to a fancy Eastern college. In fact, Abraham Lincoln had virtually no formal education at all. However, his study of the Bible…
Whenever I’m in the middle of rereading it, the novel Lolita casts such a spell on me that I often forget I have it on…
You know a book is a favorite of yours when you have multiple copies of it, and you find some of those copies in the…
Back in 2000-01, when this blog phenomenon began to take off, my dear friend Jason Scott Sadofsky encouraged me to start one of my own….
The first time I read John Irving’s The World According to Garp, I choked on a Big Mac. It was a cold March day 15…
“Writing is rewriting.” — Ernest Hemingway Yeah, yeah, I know the story about the last chapter of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms—that he…
We live in a time of word saturation. Written content of all kinds—blogs, stories, articles, essays, this blog—is freely available for downloading, printing, emailing to…
Like a lot of writers, I keep a stone on my desk to use as a paperweight. But mine has a special meaning to me…
I’m in the middle of polishing my latest novel, and because I find the process so onerous, I’ve decided to take a break from it…
Yesterday I alluded to John Gardner’s book on writing, The Art of Fiction, and casually mentioned syntactic slots. Since then, I’ve received a few emails…
I never get sick. I mean never. The last time I was sick was three years ago with a cold, and just before that, a…
Toiling away on index cards has a way of putting things in perspective. Whether you’re hunched over a cubicle deep in your local library, or…
On a snowy day in January, I wandered into a Borders bookstore and did something I always do when I’m seeking answers—I let synchronicity guide…
Over the past year, I’ve become obsessed with the writers of paperback noir/crime/sleaze novels from the late 40s through the 60s. Having now read at…
No, I’m not referring to the sick practice of using razor blades on myself—although there have been times when I’ve been tempted to. I’m talking…
Here’s the thing with pencils and typewriters—they never go out of date, they never need updated software, and they never require virus protection. Three years…
On July 17, Mickey Spillane, creator of the infamous Mike Hammer PI series, died. He was 88, and by all accounts he lived a pretty cool life.
In addition to writing several bestselling novels that readers adored, Spillane played a mystery writer on the 70s TV show Columbo, appeared in several commercials for Miller Lite beer, and married a hot second wife, Sherri Manilou, who posed for the cover of his novel The Erection Set.